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What we want when nobody's watching?

By Brendan KennedyStaff Reporter

Tues., May 10, 2011

In 1973, a psychologist at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College conducted an experiment in which he put a group of men and women together in a pitch-dark room and told them they would never learn each other's identities.

Half an hour in, they started groping one another.

True, these were college students and it was the '70s. Nevertheless, the results tell us much about the liberation of anonymity. Under the cloak of invisibility, we will exercise our desires without restraint.

So when Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, two computational neuroscientists with no background in sex research, set out to catalogue and quantify human desire, they turned to the biggest anonymous room in the world: the Internet.

They analyzed a billion web searches and half-a-million personal search histories, watched hundreds of thousands of porn videos, read millions of online personal ads and thousands of erotic stories over the course of a year to try to uncover what men and women “really like” and what they look for when nobody's watching.

The result, A Billion Wicked Thoughts — available in Canada on Tuesday — is what the authors are calling the largest and “most in-depth study of human desire since Kinsey.”

The Star spoke with Ogas from his home in Boston. This is an edited version of the conversation.

You and Sai are not sexologists or psychologists, so how did you end up doing this study?

We're computational neuroscientists, which means we view the mind as software. Most people in our field study the higher functions of the brain, such as memory, language and vision. But we decided to take a look at something that was completely overlooked in our field. We thought we could bring the techniques and the methodologies usually applied to the higher functions to try to understand sexual desire.

What makes your study different than other experiments in human sexuality?

All previous studies depended on the subjects to be honest about their sexual interests. But when you look at what people actually do on the web, what they actually search for, what they actually buy, what they actually download, that's a much clearer indication of what they're truly interested in.

What did you and Sai find most surprising about the data?

I usually say it's that men like overweight women, old women and large penises. Truly what was so surprising to us was just the clarity of the abyss between the sexes. Men and women's sexual interests are just so very, very different, much more different and fundamental than I think any of us truly realize.

In your analysis of sexual web searches, you found “youth” — usually searches for “teens” — to be by far the most popular category. “Grannies” was the 20th-most-popular search, which was far more popular than cheerleaders (79th), celebrities (23rd) and lingerie (44th). How do you explain that?

That's definitely something we don't have a clear answer to, but we're the first ones to discover and quantify it. We can only speculate by looking at some of the countries where granny porn is popular: Kenya, Great Britain and the Czech Republic have particular interest in granny porn, and there's a story in each case that might explain the popularity. In Kenya, adolescent boys are permitted to talk about sex with their grandmothers but not their parents. In Britain, we've been told that because of the public school culture, which often has matriarchs doing corporal punishment, for a lot of young boys their first physical contact with a female is an older woman. The Czech Republic is Europe's capital for sex tourism and it has a larger percentage of older prostitutes than any other country in Europe. Perhaps that has also caused an interest in older women.

You took a very non-judgmental look at various types of porn and erotica. Was that a conscious choice?

One big reason the science of sex has progressed so slowly is because it is rife with ideological battles. I think one of the biggest advantages of our approach is that we came to this without any agenda or ideology or even particular emotions about sexual behaviour, because of the kind of research we usually do, which is mathematical and algorithmic. We treated sexual behaviour simply as raw data, like the colours of a painting, which is something we analyze in our visual models. This approach paid off because, so often, previous models by sex scientists are heavily cultural and social. We weren't looking at it that way at all. We were looking at it as perceptual and cognitive.

One of the most controversial statements in your book is that gender equality inhibits arousal. Why did you come to that conclusion?

One of the most fundamental findings of our research, and one that is completely absent from the academic literature on sexuality, is the fact that men and women both seem to be hard-wired to being sexually aroused by being dominant and/or submissive. Most heterosexual men prefer to be dominant; most heterosexual women seem to enjoy being sexually submissive. This is really fascinating to us and not much discussed, but it appears that our brains come pre-wired with circuitry to enjoy both dominance and submission. It might be the case that for us to fully enjoy sex we need to embrace dominant and submissive roles in the bedroom. If we approach the bedroom as equals, where we are trying for neither person to have the power, that does seem to inhibit libido

Where are we at in terms of understanding human sexuality where we were not before your book came out?

We finally have clear ideas about the prevalence and popularity of different sexual interests. The data we've gathered is entirely different than lists of fetishes that appear in most contemporary clinical books about sexuality. Until now it's been mainly guesswork based on surveys. I think our biggest contribution is an actual model of male desire and female desire, this cue-based model. Just like we're all born with a finite set of taste cues — sweet, sour, savory, bitter, salty — it turns out we're also born with sexual cues that are biological, hard-wired cues, just like sweet and sour, that dictate what we find sexually interesting. However unlike taste cues, men and women have completely different sets of sexual cues. It's as if women were born with a sweet cue and men were born with a sour cue, so that when we taste the same thing it tastes differently to both of us.

How do you know we're not checking out she-males simply because we're curious and it's out there, rather than a genuine sexual interest?

We have search histories, so we can see what people search for over a period of time, and people search for these interests over and over again. Some things are clearly curiosity. For example, the Paris Hilton sex tape. People searched for that only once and didn't search for it again. Websites devoted to these unusual interests are also extremely popular. People purchase subscriptions to this content. So that means people are willing to pay money and risk shemale.com appearing on their credit card statement. Taking it to that level is more than just curiosity.

Do you think the proliferation of porn tube sites, such as YouPorn or PornHub, could be creating these fantasies and fetishes, rather than simply enabling them?

No. The usual reaction to these interests — granny porn and shemales, for example — is to dismiss them as deviant or as mere curiosity, but they are among the most popular. There's no cultural message or social reinforcement for men to be interested in these things, and yet they exist in large quantities all around the world. If it was simply a matter of the Internet generating these interests, all we'd be looking for would be busty blond teens.

Did the study change how you view porn?

No, and I think this is important for people to know. The interests I had before I started this project are still the same. A lot of people fear exposure to different types of pornography will generate interest in it. In my case, I watched all kinds of pornography — just about every popular kind of pornography that exists — and at this point the things I liked and searched for in the beginning are still the same things I search for now.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts is published by Dutton and available in Canadian book stores on Tuesday.

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